FAILING OUR CHILDREN: LEAD IN U.S. SCHOOL DRINKING …

NEW SOLUTIONS, Vol. 20(1) 25-47, 2010

Features

FAILING OUR CHILDREN: LEAD IN U.S. SCHOOL DRINKING WATER

YANNA LAMBRINIDOU SIMONI TRIANTAFYLLIDOU MARC EDWARDS

ABSTRACT

Lead is the most prevalent toxicant in U.S. school drinking water. Yet for the vast majority of schools, federal regulation for testing taps and remediating contamination is voluntary. Using school case studies, this article discusses the regulatory vacuum that leaves children unprotected from potential exposure to very high lead doses through consumption of school water. Controlling lead hazards from water fountains, coolers, and other drinking water outlets in schools requires improved sampling protocols that can capture the inherent variability of lead release from plumbing and measure both the particulate and dissolved lead present in water. There is a need to reevaluate the potential public health implications of lead-contaminated drinking water in schools. Accounting for this misunderstood and largely overlooked exposure source is necessary in order to better understand and address childhood lead poisoning in the U.S.

A PARADIGM CASE: LOS ANGELES UNIFIED SCHOOL DISTRICT In September 2007, children at Woodlake Avenue Elementary School in the Los Angeles suburb of Woodland Hills told their parents that teachers had advised them against drinking the water from the school's fountains. Alarmed by the warning, the father of a first grader requested that the Los Angeles Unified

25 ? 2010, Baywood Publishing Co., Inc. doi: 10.2190/NS.022010eov

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School District (LAUSD) test the school's water outlets immediately for hazardous contaminants. After several weeks of inaction, LAUSD sampled Woodlake's taps and returned in November to announce the results. One fountain dispensed over five times the amount of lead considered acceptable for school drinking water by Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) standards and was shut off [1]. LAUSD promised school-wide replacement of drinking water fountains and lead-bearing plumbing materials at Woodlake but, several weeks later, had not begun the work.

Troubled by the inertia, in January 2008 the concerned father contacted a local television news station, which launched a district-wide investigation of lead in drinking water at LAUSD. In March, undercover reporters collected samples from 30 schools and found that nine had at least one drinking water outlet that tested high for lead. Among those outlets was the very fountain at Woodlake that had been found to dispense elevated levels in the fall and was shut off. Four months after its initial sampling, the reporters found this fountain back in service, without evidence that it had undergone repairs [2].

In its exchanges with parents, LAUSD consistently asserted that the problem at Woodlake was a new discovery. When pressed by the news station, however, district officials admitted that tests eight years earlier had revealed lead-in-water elevations at several district schools, including Woodlake. In fact, according to an internal district report, widespread problems with lead in LAUSD's drinking water had first been detected in 1988. To address the contamination, in 1990 LAUSD established a flushing policy, which required running the water for 30 seconds at every fountain in every school at the beginning of each school day [3, 4]. LAUSD's flushing program was based on a 1989 EPA guidance that listed flushing as an "interim measure" for reducing lead in water that can accumulate in outlets when not in use [5].

To assess how LAUSD's policy was implemented at Woodlake and other district schools, the undercover reporters expanded their investigation to the daily routines of school custodians. They noted persistent failures to flush drinking water outlets as well as falsification of "flushing logs," indicating that flushing had occurred when it had not. In April 2008, the news station informed LAUSD about its findings. Days later, the district's superintendent held a littleannounced press conference in which he attributed the contamination to possible employee non-compliance with the flushing policy. He declared that although negligent staff would be held accountable, failure of LAUSD to flush taps "did not put any students in jeopardy" [6]. When asked why the district had not addressed the contamination sooner, the superintendent replied that in a democracy school officials depended on the public to raise problems of this nature [7].

The press conference, held seven months after the Woodlake father's original plea for action, was the district's first official acknowledgment of persistent

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lead-in-water problems at LAUSD [8]. LAUSD assured the public that it had begun sampling randomly selected drinking water fountains and was planning to remediate all those that exceeded the EPA's standard. It stressed that the district did not have the $300 million needed to replace all lead-bearing plumbing at the schools, but that it was committed to fixing the worst problems. Based on the limited number of test results available at the time, the superintendent asserted that the district's school water was "safe." "There is no reason for hysteria here," he stated [9]. The Woodlake father felt differently. "I am very concerned about [the contamination]," he said in a televised news interview, "because we don't even know really the long-term effects of this, or even the short-term effects, and we don't know how long the kids have been exposed to this" [10].

In May 2008, LAUSD began a multi-media and multi-language outreach effort to allay parent fears. As part of this campaign, it sent Woodlake a pediatric toxicologist from the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health to educate parents about the potential health impact of the contamination. The County official declared that unless students had been chewing on lead paint chips there was little to worry about, and that in fact ordinary foods and drinks contained more lead than the school's water. "If you eat one Brussels sprout, you are going to get far more lead from that one Brussels sprout than you will get from weeks of drinking water here," he said. "I guarantee you, that if you tested the milk, the soda, the juice, the water that your child gets in your own home, it dwarfs the lead that your child is getting exposed to here" [11]. Taking up the toxicologist's challenge, the news station commissioned testing of all the cited food and beverage items and revealed undetectable levels of lead in every case [12].

As it promised, LAUSD installed copper pipes and new water fountains at Woodlake. It also invested extensive resources to determine the extent of the contamination district-wide. In November 2008, it initiated comprehensive sampling of all drinking water outlets in all 735 schools at a cost of $1.5 million. Five months and more than 66,000 tests later, LAUSD announced plans to turn off indefinitely and replace more than 2,000 fountains and faucets due to high levels of lead [13]. An internal presentation for the district's Human Relations Committee and the School Safety, Student Health and Human Services Committee specified that these outlets exceeded the EPA standard for school taps on both first- and second-draw samples [14]. Some samples were tens and hundreds of times the EPA standard. At least one of the samples measured at a level sufficient to classify the drinking water as "hazardous waste" [15]. Another approximately 7,000 outlets tested high for lead only on first-draw samples. LAUSD kept these outlets in service and committed to remediating them through daily flushing. Contaminated taps were identified in 92 percent of the district's schools [16].

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THE NATIONAL SCOPE OF THE PROBLEM

The LAUSD story typifies how some K-12 schools around the nation manage lead-in-water problems and highlights a systemic neglect of an environmental health hazard. School case studies reveal a pattern of incomplete understanding about how lead-bearing plumbing materials can release lead into water and what health risks such water can pose. This pattern often leads to: 1) inertia vis-?-vis the identification and remediation of contamination; 2) reactive and suboptimal water testing programs in response to pressure from parents, teachers, and individuals outside the school community; 3) resistance to information-sharing concerning testing protocols, analytical methods, test results, and solutions; 4) delays in announcing contamination problems and avoidance of discussions about their potential health effects; 5) adoption of remedial measures that are logistically and/or financially burdensome, rooted in outdated scientific understandings of lead corrosion, or implemented inappropriately, incompletely, and without proof of effectiveness; 6) delivery of reassuring public health messages prematurely and/or without firm grounding in scientific facts; and 7) a sense of confidence and certainty when unknowns abound. As a result, the unnecessary exposure of children to lead in school drinking water is often prolonged before concrete action is taken--if ever.

In September 2009, the Associated Press (AP) released a nationwide investigation showing that lead-contaminated drinking water affects schools in at least 27 states [17]. AP's analysis was based on data from the EPA, which are limited to the 8-11 percent of the country's 132,500 schools that are required by law to sample their taps for hazardous contaminants and report results to state authorities. Because these schools regularly provide water to at least 25 individuals a day and use their own water source (e.g., private well) or treat or sell their water, they are regulated as "public water systems" [18]. The rest of the nation's schools, which receive their water from local utilities, are not subject to federal regulation, and the EPA has no direct oversight responsibility for the quality of the drinking water they provide. Some of these schools have tested their water voluntarily and, in some cases, they have discovered serious lead contamination. Our research shows that when this category of schools is taken into account, the number of documented states affected by lead-contaminated school drinking water increases to at least 39 (including the District of Columbia). There is no scientific or practical reason to believe that the problem does not extend to schools in all 50 states.

A 2006 analysis by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) revealed that few states have developed comprehensive testing and remediation programs for lead in school drinking water, and about half the states have developed no programs at all [19]. Because many schools do not test for lead in drinking water, national data on the problem are limited. As a result, the true extent to which children across the nation are exposed to lead at school taps is

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unknown. What is evident, however, is that few schools have adopted measures to prevent such exposures. State and local officials correctly attribute this omission to the regulatory vacuum that leaves the vast majority of schools with no mandatory requirements for testing, unclear guidance on remediation, and little to no information about the potential health risks of lead at the tap.

Although the conventional wisdom is that lead in school drinking water poses little health risk, substantive gaps in our understanding of a) lead corrosion, b) proper water testing methods, and c) the research on childhood lead poisoning from contaminated water may have caused the impact of exposure to be underestimated.

WHO REGULATES LEAD IN U.S. SCHOOL DRINKING WATER?

For the approximately 90 percent of U.S. schools that receive their water from local utilities, no local, state, or federal entity is required to ensure that water lead levels are acceptably low (Table 1). Although some states and regional EPA offices have, at their discretion, encouraged and even facilitated sampling at school taps, water lead levels at the majority of the nation's schools are not monitored or remediated routinely, if ever. Thus, responsibility for addressing potential problems is effectively delegated to parents, teachers, and individuals outside the school community who are usually unsuspecting of lead-in-water contamination, unaware of the health risks it might pose, unable to implement testing and remediation programs, and trusting that if there were a significant environmental hazard at school it would be controlled effectively and expediently by experts.

Comprehensive federal regulation of drinking water safety in the United States was introduced in 1974. It was spurred by several influential studies that reported widespread problems with the safety of the nation's drinking water [20, 21]. To "assure that water supply systems serving the public [met] minimum national standards for protection of public health" [22], Congress passed the "Safe Drinking Water Act" (SDWA) of 1974. The SDWA authorized the EPA to establish enforceable "Maximum Contaminant Levels" (MCLs) for all substances in drinking water with known or suspected adverse effects on human health. These minimum water quality requirements would apply to every public water system in the country, including schools and child care facilities regulated as public water systems. Federal and state agencies as well as local water supply systems were to take a central role in implementing the new law.

The EPA's National Interim Primary Drinking Water Regulations of 1975 kept 50 parts per billion (ppb), the standard set by the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) in 1962, as the maximum allowable concentration of lead in drinking water [23]. The EPA's requirement, like that of the PHS, applied at the point where the water enters the distribution system rather than at the consumer's tap. It

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